In Dan Gilroy’s 2019 film, Velvet Buzzsaw, after the discovery of a hoard of paintings by an unknown artist, the art itself enacts a brutal revenge on everyone who tries to profit from the find. One gallerist is maimed by an interactive sculpture at a gallery, and the next morning crowds take her body lying in a pool of blood on the floor to be a hyper realistic sculpture. A gallery assistant who makes the original discovery is mysteriously absorbed into the paintings in a gallery. The art dealer she worked for is killed by her tattoo of a buzzsaw blade suddenly becoming a bit too realistic.

The film broadly speaking is a commentary at the emptiness of the contemporary art world. The content of the art doesn’t matter, or rather, it matters only vis-à-vis it’s profitability. The spirit of the art only punishes those who put profit ahead of artistic expression.

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While her artworks haven’t (as far as I know) murdered any greedy art scenesters in mysterious and supernatural circumstances, the discovery of the photographs by Vivian Maier recalls the plot of Velvet Buzzsaw. She lived her life in obscurity, making a living as a nanny and during her life she produced thousands of photos of scenes on Chicago streets with her Rolleiflex camera. She never sought fame, never even developing most of her photos herself — they were discovered when her possessions were being sold off at auction after her death. It was a once-in-a-lifetime find for the three collectors who bought them. After one of them published a selection of the photographs to Flickr in 2009, they caused a sensation.[1] Having lived and died in obscurity, Vivian Maier is now the subject of numerous books, a documentary, photo collections, exhibitions, and even a novelisation of her life.

We know very little of Meier’s life, largely, I think, by design. What we know points to her being a deeply private, almost secretive person. There are very few people who can say they ever knew her, and even fewer who can say they knew her well. Yet, she is widely known as one of the most important documentarians of twentieth-century American life. Is it right for us to know her this way?

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I’m finding it hard to frame what my issue is here exactly without sounding like a hypocrite. After all, I have made my entire intellectual life about studying the works of people who are long dead. There’s a clear difference, of course, between studying the private photographs of a woman who was “discovered” posthumously — and who by all accounts didn’t want to be known this way — and studying the published works of dead thinkers.

In the case of already famous historical figures, even studying their unpublished works feels different. There’s a sense in which their seeking publication and public discussion of their works gives us a license to delve deeper into them. Consulting a dead intellectual’s archive, looking at their notes and drafts to try to understand their ideas better doesn’t strike anyone as wrong. At the same time, we know some authors have requested their unfinished works and archives be destroyed after their death. Often, we celebrate the fact this hasn’t happened as safeguarding our shared cultural legacy.

Franz Kafka asked his friend and literary executor, Max Brod, to destroy all of his unpublished writings after he died. This would have meant us being deprived of some of the most significant works of twentieth-century European literature, such as his novels The Trial and The Castle. Brod, famously argued that Kafka knew that if he wanted the request taken seriously, he should have gone to someone else.

Maier’s case strikes me as different. Kafka was, in his life, at least trying to publish his works. We know from numerous sources that he was diffident about his writing and destroyed much of it himself. But we can’t deny that there was at least an intention in him to try to publish. Maier strikes me as the opposite. She was an intensely private woman. The children she babysat reported the way she always kept the door to her room locked, how nobody was allowed in. There are so few accounts of her life from other people that it’s clear she didn’t really want to let anyone into her inner life. It’s unsurprising, given this, that she never developed most of her photographs. Even if we put it down to her lacking the means to have her photos developed, there is nothing in her life that points to her wanting her art displayed.

With this in mind, we could ascribe Maier’s fame in part to the enigma of her life. In her novel about Maier’s life, Christina Hesselholdt has Maier explain herself:

People love riddles, the incomplete and the inexplicable are tremendously compelling. I am The Mysterious Lady. The Sawn-in-half Lady, where the past is what is sawn off.

Hesselholdt puts these words in Maier’s mouth to explain our infatuation with her work.

Elsewhere in the novel, one of Maier’s employers suggests he’s looking forward to seeing her photos developed:

She replied that she did not always have [the photographs] developed because it was too expensive. ‘And besides, I have seen them,’ she said, tapping the box camera, ‘down here.’[2]

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Hesselholdt isn’t doing anything wrong here. She’s clearly drawn by curiosity, and perhaps a certain kind of regret about Maier not trying to make her art more public, about making herself more public. Near the end of the novel, Hesselholdt’s narrator speaks directly with Maier:

You should have displayed a little more courage. You should have lain your cards on the table. You should have jumped out of the closet: as an artist.

This regret is something many of us feel when we think of writers and artists who died in obscurity, or who died prematurely with their work unfinished. What would Benjamin’s Arcades project look like if he had time to finish it? Would K have made it into the castle in Kafka’s novel? Would Van Gogh had found peace and created even greater masterpieces if he were successful while alive? At the same time, how would their work have changed if they had in life the fame they deservedly found after death? All these cultural artifacts that are so important to us now would likely be different, perhaps even losing whatever aura they have that makes them great art.

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I realise not many people might agree with me that making someone like Vivian Maier famous after death is, at best, questionable. Museums are filled with the personal effects of dead people. There are museums dedicated to those dead people. We tend to see these objects as important since they show us something about the people they belonged to. Does Napoleon Bonaparte’s hairbrush say much about the man? Probably not, but it’s neat that we can look at it and imagine some of his essence transferred to it. Everyday objects teach us about the way our world once was. And the kinds of personal affects people have can tell us about the people, and we have a right and a need to understand our own past.

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A recent example that comes to mind is the publication history of Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s Until August, which is marketed by the publisher as his “lost novel”. The reality is much less dramatic, it was simply the novel he never finished. As Alexandra Alter points out in the New York Times, Garcia Marquez requested that his sons destroy and not publish after his death. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the book has come out to mixed reviews, with the New York Times’ Michael Greenberg writing that it would be “hard to imagine a more unsatisfying goodbye” from Garcia Marquez, while in the Guardian, Lucy Hughes-Hallet writes that “no one, except for the publicists whose job it is to do so, is pretending that it is a masterpiece.”

Garcia Marquez’s sons recognise the perception that their disobeying their father’s wishes might be seen as a cynical cash grab and claim that this was an opportunity for the reading audience to see another side of his work. One of them, Gonzalo Garcia Barcha, goes so far as to implicitly compare himself to Max Brod in saying that there are “plenty of examples in the history of literature of people who are requested to destroy manuscripts, and then they turn out to be important items in literature.”

Given Garcia Marquez’s status as an artist, I doubt an unfinished novel would change much in the way his work is received or understood. It might prompt some speculation about the direction his work might have taken had he lived longer and not suffered from dementia. What can’t be denied is that publishing this work will be incredibly lucrative to the brothers. There is a clear monetary incentive for them to do this. I imagine they’re already fabulously wealthy, having inherited their father’s estate. And yet, it’s easy to see how they might want more. The wealthy often do.

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It is the financial motive, though, isn’t it? If an artist dies, and doesn’t have heirs or an estate to contend with, it’s so much easier to make bank, right? All the better if she is extremely prolific. All the better if she is a genius. And Maier is both those things. There are thousands of photographs she left behind and they’re very consistently gorgeous. What a treasure to find for the right collector. But what’s a treasure worth if there isn’t a market to set its value?

The gallerists who ended up purchasing Maier’s archive make much of the cultural significance of her photographs, of how lucky we are to have found them and to be able to see twentieth-century America through her camera lens. What a shame it would be not to promote them? And of course, they deserve a cut for doing so. I have no doubt that they would vigorously deny such motivations. There is still on the Flickr forums a thread by John Maloof, the first of the collectors to uncover Maier’s work, where he asks what he should do with it the photographs. At least in his case, we can argue that he was driven by curiosity and the sense that he has stumbled onto something artistically significant. We should count ourselves as lucky that they have been found and that we can look at them.  Similarly, we are lucky that we have Kafka’s novels, the Aeneid, Van Gogh’s paintings, Emily Dickinson’s poems, and the works of many other artists who died in obscurity. Without these works we would be worse off. Or, perhaps, we’d be incomprehensibly different to what we are now, as a culture.

Even though Vivian Maier is now famous, and her works are the subject of books, documentaries, novels, and essays, we are still only at the cusp of discovering her work and coming to terms with it. We have still only seen a fraction of what she created. I don’t doubt that we will see much more in the coming years. But given this is a beginning, it’s also an opportunity to do this right. If her work really is as culturally important as many claim it is, it ought to be owned by everyone. In the internet age we have the means to make all of these photographs and materials available to everyone, preserved and displayed, away from the necromantic urges of capital accumulation at the expense of a dead artist.

But even then, if the collectors who owned her archive did present the photographs entirely freely for everyone in the world, the question remains: is this what Vivian Maier would have wanted and is artistic merit enough to justify our voyeurism into her life?

[1] While the Flickr page seems to have disappeared, John Maloof, the first of the collectors to unearth Maier’s work hosts many of her works on a website.

[2] Christina Hesselholdt, 2021, Vivian, trans. Paul Russell Garrett. Fitzcarraldo Eds., London.

Image: Don Sniegowski